Services

Our DNA

Experimental and innovative, The Design Spot weaves design into the scientific, technological and entrepreneurial fabric of the Paris-Saclay excellence cluster.

About us

Unique in France, The Design Spot is a design center initiated by Université Paris-Saclay to support its tens of thousands of students, researchers and entrepreneurs in their R&D projects by providing them with design expertise so they can meet the expectations of tomorrow’s society.

The Design Spot organizes multidisciplinary workshops and holds meetings, conferences and master classes with the aim of promoting the design disciplines throughout the Paris-Saclay ecosystem.

The Design Spot features 270m² dedicated to collective intelligence: a fully modular coworking and presentation space, a workshop with rapid prototyping facilities, a reading and research area, and a meeting room.

Our missions

Support

The Design Spot provides laboratories, researchers and engineers with the necessary resources to connect research projects with functions and markets through design.

Educate

The Design Spot makes Université Paris-Saclay students and faculty more familiar with the discipline and encourages them to integrate design into their projects.

Research

The Design Spot fulfills a research mission, promoting design research and reflection on the discipline itself.

A word from the Director

“The union of design and science represents the future of our society and our economy; it is this union that will shape the quality of our lives in the future. Design humanizes technologies: it makes them “desirable” by connecting them to people’s needs and practices and thereby giving them meaning. But design not only produces meaning, it adds pleasure to the use, sight, feel, sound, and understanding of things. It is this artistic dimension that makes it so effective and persuasive. There is nothing that makes industry and commerce work better than the combination of utility and desire, and design exists to deliver this “desirability.” My goal is for The Design Spot to ensure that, thanks to design, the university’s students and researchers are better equipped to solve the increasingly complex issues they have to face.”

— Vincent Créance, Director of The Design Spot

Network

The Design Spot is a member of several design organizations including Agence pour la promotion de la création industrielle (APCI) and the World Design Organization (WDO).

The University

Université Paris-Saclay integrates 14 leading instutions (engineering and business schools, public universities and research centers) that are part of the world’s top research organizations, particularly in high-tech and technology fields. It is part of the Paris-Saclay project, a research-intensive academic campus and business cluster being developed on the Plateau de Saclay near Paris. Several large international companies have already located their research, development and education centers at Paris-Saclay (Danone, Air Liquide, Thales, EDF, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Dassault Systèmes, Ipsen, General Electric).